Tag Archives: Leftism

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Somalian woman lied to get asylum and $417,000 of welfare benefits

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Story from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Abdulle, who also used the fake name Amina Muse and is from Somalia, was living in Gothenburg when the authorities insisted immigrants learn Swedish if they wanted to continue to claim handouts.

She told a friend she couldn’t be bothered and moved to England where she knew it would be far easier to collect benefits.

She made up a story to gain asylum and gave herself and five of her six children false names and dates of birth, fraudulently claiming benefits on both the real and invented identities.

And she somehow managed to continue claiming benefits in Sweden for three years after leaving.

Abdulle was born in Mogadishu in 1969 but moved to Sweden in 1994.

Her friend Hodan Abdullahi Egal, who lives in Gothenburg, said yesterday: ‘Ayan liked life here. She never worked, just took things easy and spent her time meeting up with old friends from Mogadishu.

‘But she couldn’t be bothered to learn another language. Instead she decided to move to England.

‘She said it was the land of easy money. She was convinced she would have no problems there because the system there made it far easier to collect money without proper checks.’

Abdulle arrived in London in 2004 with her first five children, now aged eight to 17, and her husband Raghe Adan, and claimed asylum under the name Amina Ali Muse.

In her application, she said militiamen had targeted her home in Somalia on December 1, 1998, shooting her brothers dead.

She claimed she had been gang raped while three months pregnant, leading to a miscarriage, and that her niece had been raped, tortured and beaten.

In fact, on that date Abdulle had been in Sweden giving birth to a daughter.

Between June 2004 and May 2010, Abdulle, who was living in Neasden, North-West London, claimed £261,358.14 in handouts.

The cash came from almost every welfare benefit possible, including income support, disability living allowance, carers’ allowance, jobseekers’ allowance, housing benefit, council tax benefit, tax credits and child benefit.

[…]Abdulle… cannot be deported after finishing her sentence because she was granted British citizenship in 2009.

I wonder how welfare laws like this get passed? Oh I know – people vote for left-wingers who are “compassionate” so they can redistribute the money they collect from high-earning productive taxpayers and business owners. That way, the do-gooders in government feel superior, the people who vote for higher tax rates feel superior, and the people who receive working people’s money feel superior. Everybody wins! Everybody!

Giving money to the government is good! We should do more of that so that we can all feel like we are nice people! When I tell people that I vote for “compassion”, they like me! And that’s what voting is for! Feelings! Social acceptance! It’s not like my company needed the money – they would just wasted it on giving people jobs to make stuff. And it’s not like I needed the money – I would just waste it getting married. Much better for deserving poor people who are down on their luck through no fault of their own to get it.

In compassionate Canada, you can marry several people over the phone and collect welfare for each of them. Now that’s compassion that we can all feel good about!

News

Why did the mainstream media ignore Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist obsession?

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First, a bit more about Loughner from the Arizona Republic. (H/T Robert Stacy McCain)

Excerpt:

At the end of Loughner’s junior year, in May 2006, the school nurse had him taken to the emergency room. “Extremely intoxicated,” the sheriff’s report would later say. It was 9 in the morning.

Loughner told a deputy that he stole a bottle of vodka from his parents because his father had yelled at him.

Loughner was changing. Drugs and alcohol blurred some days, but what friends remember most are the things he thought. Theories, ideas, strange questions.

In Loughner’s latter two years of high school, friend George Osler saw him drinking and smoking marijuana more and more.

He would go off on these tangents and then he would stop talking altogether,” Osler said. “He struck me as odd. It was an uncomfortable feeling.”

Loughner began fixating on a documentary: “Zeitgeist: The Movie.”

The movie is a bramble of conspiracy theories involving Sept. 11, the international monetary system, and Christianity.

“There are people guiding your life and you don’t even know it,” the trailer for the movie intones.

“He wanted to watch it all the time,” Osler said. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”

Loughner developed a seeming obsession with currency, grammar and literacy rates. They were becoming the objects of his rants and screeds. Those around him didn’t understand.

By the way, Mary wanted me to mention this refutation of Zeitgeist by New Zealand philosopher Glenn Peoples.

Robert McCain is happy about this new mainstream media coverage of the story he broke, but not happy with the rest of the mainstream media that is still silent.

He writes:

As of noon Sunday, there were 39 search results on Google News for “Loughner+Zeitgeist.” Most of those were passing mentions. Meanwhile, a Google News search for “Loughner+Palin” returned 10,395 results. There were 595 results for “Loughner+Limbaugh.”

By comparison, so far as I have been able to determine, by Sunday noon there had been exactly five substantial articles devoted specifically to the Loughner-Zeitgeist connection:

Thursday, the Washington Post published a 2,700-word profile of Jared Lee Loughner, and today the New York Times published a 5,000-word profile of the Tucson killer.

Neither story so much as mentioned Zeigeist.

Can you count on the Washington Post and New York Times to tell you the truth about the world? Or rather, will they tell you what they want you to think about the world so that you will vote “the right way” – for left-wing politicians?

Certainly there could be that element of wanting to make people vote for Democrats and wanting to demonize Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. But I think another reason why they didn’t report on it is because they don’t disagree with the ideas presented in the movie. They may be sympathetic that Christianity is a myth, that 9/11 is some sort of conspiracy to make poor, innocent Islamic theocrats look bad, and that global communism really would be much better than free market capitalism. Jared’s beliefs are the mainstream media’s beliefs. So why would they associate murder with their own beliefs?

And moreover, the mainstream media doesn’t DO detailed historical investigations of Christianity, so they would be more likely to fall for “Christianity is a myth” viewpoints. Even on the right-wing, you have ignorant journalists reducing Christianity to faith, who have never heard of William Lane Craig, the kalam argument, the fine-tuning argument, or specified complexity. All of these complicated arguments for theism are just beyond them – they only want to believe things that will make the right kinds of people like them, and provide them with maximum autonomy in their own lives. Their support for things like abortion and same-sex marriage isn’t something that they have carefully weighed by listening to academic debates… they take their position because they want to behave selfishly and do not want to be told about boundaries or consequences. And they embrace left-wing economic policies because it gives them the feeling of being enlightened, compassionate and generous… with other people’s money. They love the idea that people can act selfishly and stupidly and yet be rescued with someone else’s money.

So don’t expect the mainstream media to tell the truth about stories like this. They are Democrats, and they will never undermine the central pillars of the Democrat party, which are largely in agreement with the Zeitgeist movie. Those pillars are, of course, that Christianity is a myth, that Christian positions on social issues are therefore false, that American military action is necessarily imperialistic and evil, and that socialism would be much better at creating prosperity for the masses than free market capitalism. Most event reporting is going to be massaged so that it fits that narrative, to some degree or other. Not sports stories, but certainly sensational stories like this one.

Is the media biased to the left?

Here’s a UCLA study on media bias.

Excerpt:

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third.

[…]The fourth most centrist outlet was “Special Report With Brit Hume” on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “Nightly News” to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

From the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

Senior executives, on-air personalities, producers, reporters, editors, writers and other self-identifying employees of ABC, CBS and NBC contributed more than $1 million to Democratic candidates and campaign committees in 2008, according to an analysis by The Examiner of data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Democratic total of $1,020,816 was given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks, with an average contribution of $880.

By contrast, only 193 of the employees contributed to Republican candidates and campaign committees, for a total of $142,863. The average Republican contribution was $744.

Don’t count on them to tell you the truth… that’s not their job.

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News

Zeitgeist conspiracy movie had profound impact on Jared Loughner

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Robert Stacy McCain is ALL OVER this story. Let’s get caught up.

Here’s Zach Osler, a friend of the Tucson murderer.

That’s an Associated Press video.

Transcript excerpt:

“There was a lot of talk about lucid dreaming and understanding reality. . . . And there were a lot of books and movies . . . things that I never would have heard about or watched — things like Loose Change about the 9/11 conspiracy . . . He watched things like that. . . . He had basically nothing going for him, and I think he just couldn’t deal with reality anymore. . . . I know that he was experimenting with the drug, or herb or whatever it is, salvia divinorum. And from what I hear, he used it quite frequently. . . . It’s like a hallucinogenic type of effect.”

McCain also links to more interesting stuff:

Loughner, now 22, would come over several times a week from 2007 to 2008, the Oslers said.

The boys listened to the heavy-metal band Slipknot and progressive rockers the Mars Volta, studied the form of meditative movement called tai chi and watched and discussed movies.

Loughner’s favorites included little-known conspiracy theory documentaries such as “Zeitgeist” and “Loose Change” as well as bigger studio productions with cult followings and themes of brainwashing, science fiction and altered states of consciousness, including “Donnie Darko” and “A Scanner Darkly.” . . .

Roxanne Osler [said]: “Jared struck me as a young man who craved attention and acceptance.”

In another post McCain summarizes a conspiracy theory movie called “Zeitgeist” in another post.

PART I: Attacking Christianity as a ‘Myth’

This segment has been called “The Da Vinci Code on steroids.” Toward the end, the narrator says, “Christianity, along with all other theistic belief systems, is the fraud of the age. It serves to detach the species from the natural world and likewise, from each other. It supports blind submission to authority. It reduces human responsibility to the effect that God controls everything.”

PART II: 9/11 Was a Conspiracy

Not much to say here. You’ve seen one 9/11 “Truther” documentary, you’ve seen ‘em all. But the guys at Loose Change can’t sue for copyright infringement because, hey, it’s a “documentary,” and you can’t copyright crazy.

PART III: TOTAL FREAKING KOOKINESS!

This is the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test of Zeitgeist where, if you’ve gone along with the Jesus-Was-a-Myth stuff and the 9/11-Was-a-U.S.-Plot stuff, you’re going to find yourself throbbing helplessly in spasms of conspiratorial ecstasy, covered in kook-splooge. The U.S. government and “international bankers” scheme behind the scenes to control every damned thing in the world — and plant computer chips in your brain, to boot!

Guess who liked Zeitgeist? Jared Loughner. He liked Zeitgeist a whole lot.

Does Zeitgeist sound like right-wing Tea Party material? It’s an atheistic, anti-American, anti-capitalist movie. And that’s what Jared believed. That’s why he favorited flag-burning videos. He is the complete opposite of a Tea Party conservative.

I wonder why the left-wing mainstream news media isn’t reporting on what Jared’s friends are saying about his views?

In fact, I wonder what the left-wing media thinks of Zeitgeist? I wonder what the left-wing media thinks of Loose Change? I wonder what the left-wing media thinks of capitalism? I wonder what the left-wing media thinks on the war against Islamic extremism? I wonder what the left-wing media thinks of American exceptionalism? I wonder what the left-wing media thinks of Christian theism?

Can they afford to tell the truth about this story?